After a wave of layoffs, tech is hiring for AI jobs

In the past month, Netflix has posted at least seven openings on LinkedIn for jobs related to AI and machine learning that would pay between $150,000 and $900,000 a year. One listing for an “Engineering Manager, Consumer ML Model Compute & Serving Foundations,” gives a salary of up to $900,000. The listing seeks someone who “will be highly cross-functional in partnering with other engineering, product management, machine learning, and data teams to take Netflix’s ML/AI initiatives to the next level.”

Read more: Netflix criticized for posting AI jobs paying up to $900,000 while writers and actors are on strike

Apple’s job listings on LinkedIn include openings for research scientists and engineers specializing in AI, paying at least $140,000 a year.

Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc.
META,
+2.17%
lists at least four AI-related jobs on LinkedIn that pay on average of $200,000 annually.

The trend is somewhat ironic given the fear among tech employees and U.S. workers in general that they will eventually be replaced by bots. The unemployment rate in Santa Clara County, the home of Silicon Valley, is now 3.6%, compared with 2.7% a year ago.

Many of the AI job openings are based in the San Francisco Bay Area, which has quickly become the epicenter of AI development and startups, said Colin Fleming, executive vice president of global marketing at Salesforce, citing several research reports.

In May 2023, nearly 60% of new generative-AI job postings were in the Bay Area. Over the previous 10 months, just six metropolitan areas — San Francisco, San Jose, New York, Los Angeles, Boston and Seattle — accounted for nearly half of the generative-AI job postings in the Brookings Institution’s database.

Rockset, an AI startup based in San Mateo, Calif., is one of the companies that is hiring. The 80-person company on Tuesday said it had raised $44 million in funding, bringing its total capital raised to date to $105 million.

After months of being derided as a mecca of crime and homelessness straight out a dystopian comic book, San Francisco is slowly clawing its way back and may be poised for tech’s biggest boom ever. AI has taken off since the public debut of San Francisco-based OpenAI’s vastly improved chatbot, ChatGPT, in November.

Read more: Salesforce is hosting the biggest AI show in the U.S. in a few weeks

Nineteen of the world’s top 55 AI companies are headquartered in San Francisco, and Salesforce’s annual conference, Dreamforce, will be the largest get-together of generative-AI talent in the country, according to the company. Some 40,000 people are expected to attend the September event in person.

The three-day event will cap a busy summer of AI in the city. San Francisco hosted 58 AI-related events in July, according to local AI company Cerebral Valley.